A Novel Robust Nonlinear Motion Controller With Disturbance Observer

A nonlinear robust controller design method is proposed for the lateral control of heavy vehicles for automated highway systems. In the controller design, the actuator dynamics is explicitly taken into account. A first order pre-filter is introduced to reduce chattering which is inherent in the nonlinear robust controller and to prevent the saturation in the front wheel steering angle and steering system slew rate. A constructive backstepping design technique is utilized in the design of a robust controller for the augmented system. Simulation results are shown.

Robust velocity and height control problem is dealt with for hypersonic vehicles subject to highly nonlinearity and uncertainties. The linear robust controller design for nonlinear systems suffers from the conservation problem, because the nonlinear dynamics are considered as uncertainties. In this paper, a feedback linearization controller is firstly applied to achieve the dynamic decoupling of the velocity and height channels. Then, robust controllers are designed for each channel to restrain the effects of the parametric uncertainties, external disturbances, and nonlinear dynamics, which cannot be counteracted accurately by the feedback linearization technique. This method can guarantee the robust stability and robust tracking properties of the closed-loop control system, while the conservation of the robust controller design can be reduced because the nonlinear information of dynamic system is used. Simulation comparisons are given to show the advantages of the proposed robust nonlinear control method.

Nonlinear Robust Adaptive Control for Spacecraft Proximity Operations

In this paper, a Multi-Index Nonlinear Robust Adaptive Control (MINRAC) method was proposed for ultra-complex multi-input multi-output power systems with uncertain parameter factors and external disturbances. The controller designed by this method has excellent static and dynamic characteristics. Under the condition of the uncertainty of system parameters and external disturbance at the same time, the MINRAC method can ensure that the multiple indexes concerned by ultra-complex power systems can be controlled at their expected values. The simulation results showed that the control mechanism of MINRAC method was consistent in both single-machine infinite bus system and multi-machine interconnected coupling system. The output function chooses power angle, angular frequency and terminal voltage as constraints. When the system has parameter uncertainty and external interference, the uncertain parameter values are adjusted by adaptive control to force these indicators to tend to the given expected value. For three-phase short circuit, which is the most serious fault in power system, the use of multi index nonlinear robust controller can ensure that the system is stable in a wide range and has better dynamic performance.

In this paper a new nonlinear robust adaptive excitation control strategy for multi-machine power systems is presented. The designed controller is adaptive to unknown generator parameters, and robust to model errors or disturbances. It is locally implemented and independent of network topology or load conditions. In the paper the power system model is presented and the control law and adaptive law are derived. The close-loop system stability is proven. Computer test results show clearly that the proposed excitation control strategy can enhance transient stability more effectively than conventional controllers.

While linear robust control theory is relatively well understood with many standard techniques for control system analysis and controller design, methods for designing robust nonlinear controllers are relatively undeveloped. This constitutes a significant gap between control theory and practice, as most real processes have significant nonlinearities associated with their startup and shutdown, and often during normal operations. Hence, the development of robust nonlinear controller design methods is widely recognized as one of the most important and challenging open fundamental problems in process control theory. Here, a rigorous approach is developed for designing robust nonlinear controllers using a combination of dynamic nonlinearity inversion and bilinear matrix inequalities.

Based on a non-linear model of a computer numerical control (CNC) system, a general adaptive robust controller (ARC) is presented in this paper. The ARC was used to treat problems including the compensation of friction non-linearity, parameter variation, and unmodelled dynamics in the design of a CNC system. It can enhance stability robustness and performance robustness. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the method.

SummaryThis article addresses a novel technique for the simultaneous design of a robust nonlinear controller and static anti‐windup compensator (AWC) for uncertain nonlinear systems under actuator saturation and exogenous bounded input. The system is presumed to have locally Lipschitz nonlinearities, time‐varying uncertainties (appearing both in the linear as well as nonlinear dynamics and both in the state in addition to the output equations), and external norm‐bounded inputs both in the state and the output equations. Several bilinear matrix inequality–based conditions are derived to simultaneously design the robust nonlinear controller and AWC gains for uncertain nonlinear systems by employing the Lyapunov functional, reformulated Lipschitz property, uncertainty bounds, linear parameter‐varying approach, modified local and global sector conditions, iterative linear matrix inequality algorithm, convex optimization procedure, and gain minimization. The proposed multiobjective AWC‐based dynamic robust nonlinear controller guarantees the mitigation of saturation effects, robustness against time‐varying parametric norm‐bounded uncertainties, the asymptotic stability of the closed‐loop nonlinear system under zero external disturbances, and the attenuation of disturbance effects under nonzero external disturbances. The effectiveness of the proposed AWC‐based dynamic robust nonlinear controller synthesis scheme is illustrated by simulation examples.

In this paper, a novel adaptive robust control (ARC) scheme is proposed for electro-hydraulic servo systems (EHSSs) with uncertainties and disturbances. All dynamic functions in system dynamics are effectively approximated by multi-layer radial basis function neural network (RBF NN)-based approximators with online adaptive mechanisms. Moreover, neural network-based disturbance observers (NN-DOBs) are established to actively estimate and efficiently compensate for the effects of not only the matched/mismatched but also the imperfections of RBF NN-based approximators on the control system. Based on that, the nonlinear robust control law which integrates RBF NNs and NN-DOBs is synthesized via the sliding mode control (SMC) approach to guarantee the high-accuracy position tracking performance of the overall control system. Furthermore, the problem of the combination between DOBs and RBF NNs is first introduced in this paper to treat both disturbances and uncertainties in the EHSS. The stability of the recommended control mechanism is proven by using Lyapunov theory. Finally, numerical simulations with several distinct frequency levels of reference trajectory are conducted to convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A nonlinear robust adaptive backstepping attitude controller is designed for a reusable launch vehicle in reentry phase under input constraint, model uncertainty and external disturbance. for the couplings between the translational and rotational motions, a control-oriented model (COM) with uncertainty is firstly derived to succinctly design controller. It is worth pointing out that the uncertain terms in the COM do not need to satisfy linear parameterization assumption, and their upper bounds do not need to be known in advance. The robust adaptive laws are developed to estimate the upper bounds online. To facilitate analytic computation for the time derivative of virtual control input, a second-order filter is employed to estimate it. An additional system is constructed to handle input constraint. By rigorous analysis, the tracking error is guaranteed to converge to a random neighborhood around zero by appropriately choosing parameters. At the end, the effectiveness of the designed controller is shown by compared simulations.

Robust adaptive nonlinear control of a magnetic levitation system

This paper considers the control problem of a popular magnetic levitation system, which is open-loop unstable and strongly nonlinear associated with the electromechanical dynamics. The system dynamics is governed by a third-order nonlinear differential equation. The overall controller is designed through a backstepping manner by combining both the robust control and disturbance observer techniques. With the help of nonlinear damping terms, the input-to-state stability property of the overall nonlinear control system is proved, which leads to a major academic contribution of construction of a theoretically guaranteed robust nonlinear controller with disturbance observer for the first time in the literature. Experimental results are included to show the excellent position tracking performance of the designed control system.

The problem of robust velocity and height control is dealt with for hypersonic vehicles subject to high nonlinearity and uncertainties. Robust linear controller design for nonlinear systems suffers from the problem of conservation because the nonlinear dynamics are considered as uncertainties. In this paper, a feedback linearization controller is firstly applied to achieve dynamic decoupling of the velocity and height channels. Robust controllers are then designed for each channel to achieve the desired tracking and restrain the effects of parametric uncertainties, external disturbances, and nonlinear dynamics, which cannot be accurately counteracted by the feedback linearization technique. This method can guarantee the robust stability and robust tracking properties of the closed-loop control system. Moreover, the conservation of the robust controller design can be reduced because the nonlinear information of the dynamic system is used. Simulation results are given to show the advantages of the proposed robust nonlinear control method compared with its linear counterpart.

Friction nonlinearity and uncertainty are the main factors affecting the highly performance control of electromagnetic actuators. In this paper, a nonlinear adaptive robust control strategy is proposed of electromagnetic actuators with friction nonlinearity and uncertainty compensation. First, the dynamical model of the electromagnetic actuator is established considering nonlinearity and uncertainty. Then, an adaptive robust controller is designed based on the continuously differentiable friction model to ensure that the control input is continuously and bounded. In the design of the controller, the unfavorable effects of unknown parameters in the electromagnetic actuator are eliminated by constructing a parameter adaptive law. Meanwhile, in order to improve the tracking accuracy of the electromagnetic actuator, a nonlinear robust control law is designed to ensure the robustness of the controller. The stability analysis by Lyapunov function shows that the asymptotic tracking effect can be obtained when only parameter uncertainty exists in the closed-loop system of the electromagnetic actuator, and the consistent bounded stability can be ensured when the system also exists uncertain nonlinearity. Extensive comparative results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

This paper presents a general framework for robust adaptive neural network (NN)‐based feedback linearization controller design for greenhouse climate system. The controller is based on the well‐known feedback linearization, combined with radial basis functions NNs, which allows the feedback linearization technique to be used in an adaptive way. In addition, a robust sliding mode control is incorporated to deal with the bounded disturbances and the approximation errors of NNs. As a result, an inherently nonlinear robust adaptive control law is obtained, which not only provides fast and accurate tracking of varying set‐points, but also guarantees asymptotic tracking even if there are inherent approximation errors. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.